Think of it this way, if you’re a change agent, whether it be an agile coach, change manager, change leader, or change <insert noun here>, think of the last job you had where a change happened to you. Now imagine some annoying change person came up to you and said: “Hi Biff, this is what’s in it for you, are you ready to adopt the change?” Or “Hey Biff, here’s specifically what we are changing about your job, please tell me what percentage of adoption of the new mindset you are at for our report.” What would you do?

The term change communication made sense 20 years ago when you went to the mailbox once a day, and received 2 phone calls a day, but today’s world of instant information exchange has changed that. Back then, what was said to be change communication was simply broadcasting and that made a lot of sense when there were 11 TV channels, 30-minute news segments once a day, and no social media.

For the sake of argument, and to frame some of the ideas, practical techniques and thoughts below, here are some things we use change communicationsstrategies and tactics for:

Informing people of stuff (emails, newsletters, blog posts, posters on the wall etc)

For governance for a variety of reasons (regulations, CYA etc)

To show change sponsors/stakeholders that we’re actually doing something

To collect feedback about the change (surveys sent via email etc)

Hosting workshops/town halls and other in-person things

Coaching managers behind closed doors so they can broadcast the message to their people

Training, support, building momentum through success stories etc

We can’t not do these things, but these are all largely broadcasting techniques. Town halls are usually scripted, questions are either curated by the comms professional, or filtered in some way, and collecting open and honest feedback is sometimes an exercise in optics.

I’m not entirely sure how much change communicators are aware of the power they have. I’ve seen executives parrot what their comms people have come up with so be careful.

Do You want Dialogue or to Be Communicated At?

20 years ago I was promoted to the Director of Storefront Development when the startup I was employee #3 at was acquired. I came into work one day and saw a box of business cards on my desk labeled “Jason Little, Director of Storefront Development”

Up until then I was doing ringtone music production, and back office development work, and running our mobile content stores, back catalogue, and licensing reporting. By the way, if you downloaded images and ringtones in the early 2000’s, I probably made it, and there’s a good chance you had a picture of my cat on your phone.

Captured on a FILM camera!

Anyway, when I saw the business cards on my desk, my brain said, “cool! Hey wait, am I gunna get more money?”

My boss, who to this day is the greatest leader I have ever worked for (ok, he’s tied with another guy), became my mentor, challenged me, pushed me, called me on my own bullshit, but otherwise listened to me, knew what I was all about and ‘managed’ me based on what he knew I needed.

He didn’t communicate at me through many re-platforms, company strategy shifts, launches into new markets, re-organizations, the implementation of time tracking, and structure changes as a result of insane growth, he just did his thing.

I’ve been fired, downsized, forced to move teams, forced to adopt a new tool/technology/process and in every case I can remember, I wanted to go to the source of the change – which meant the leader/manager/exec – for dialogue.

First, Precursors.

Know what the change is, have an idea of how it’ll be received, what should be open and transparent and what should stay hidden. For example, if your change is laying off 100 people, transparency *might* not be the best idea in the short term. Know your culture and how “it” typically responds to change.

Painfully Obvious Statement #2 – Why/When/How/How Much/How to get feedback, and what to do with it

Your change isn’t the only thing that’s competing for the real-estate inside of people’s heads. In the last week, over 1000 things have been vying for my attention:

The scary thing about that report is, I turned off email notifications months ago so add another few hundred to that figure. 20 years ago, 3 things would have been vying for my attention so my brain had the luxury of time and the attention span of ….uh….um….sorry, can’t think of something off the top of my head.

We are all oversaturated with incoming information so when you’re figuring out your approach, here are some ideas that may be useful.

Broadcasting – When you need to send out information

Think like a marketer: drip campaigns, workflow automation, message tracking etc. If you can use marketing automation platforms like SendLane, or Active Campaign, you’ll be able to customize messages for individuals and groups of people. For example, if some people open and interact with every message, they probably need less followup messages, and more dialogue. For people who never open the messages, they might need a one-on-one, or the change really doesn’t impact them very much. Either way, thinking like a marketer is extremely helpful to understand your ‘customers’

Broadcasting should lead to dialogue. Know who your movers are, and how they influence people in the organization. As I mentioned above, the people interacting with your marketing campaigns are the ones who are already bought in, enlist them into your extended change network.

Advertise where people are. This isn’t a secret, walk into any office and there’s tons of crap all over the walls advertising internal meetups, new employee programs and more. The key is, how can you get your message heard through all the noise?

A sign on a walking path near my house advertising a 5K charity walk. Odds are people who walk on the trails might join.

Insert False Rumours: Yeah, that’s right. Put wrong information into the rumour mill and see what it stirs up. I’ve heard a few stories of companies who use Slack or other anonymous forums that allow employees to post rumours for confirmation or debunking.

Dialogue – When you need meaningful discussion, alignment, and meaning

1 Use Lean Coffee….properly.

Lean Coffee is dialogue. You, as the change person, are the facilitator. Whatever the group decides to talk about, gets talked about. Learn more about lean coffee here.

Make notes of who’s coming, what questions they have, their body language, disposition, general attitude and how others react to the dialogue.

For example, I facilitated a lean coffee hosted by executives during a transformation. The number one voted question was how to get reimbursed for training because the current process was frustrating for people. Our theme was the transformation, but this is what the group wanted to talk about, so we talked about it. Resist the desire to control the conversation and to stay on message. It’s more important to let the dialogue go where it needs to go.

2) If you *have to* have a change comms plan, visualize it

I shouldn’t have to explain this. If you can’t see the work, you can’t manage it. The picture below shows a communication plan for an enterprise system replacement. This team visualized their existing plan and once the wall was populated they ended up removing half of the touch points because they felt is was too overwhelming.

That led to a discussion about how to measure the effectiveness of each medium the broadcasting was going through.

At in-person town halls, events etc, use sli.do or some other tool to get feedback in a safe way. Don’t spin the messages, don’t seed the questions, and don’t curate them at all. Employees see right through that.

CEO and CTO take anonymous questions that are voted on in real-time. At the event the following year, IT had blocked http://sli.do so we found another similar tool!

4) Never Say “but I TOLD you that already!!”

5) Diversity and Inclusiveness

Invite everyone to open spaces, lean coffees or other dialogue-enabling sessions. Mix people from different department and hierarchical levels so they can share perspectives.

6) Social Proof

During dialogue sessions, let people tell stories about their experience, or use lightning talks to share bursts of information followed by a world cafe style session.

For me, what’s most important is the stance you’re taking whether you’re broadcasting or facilitating meaningful dialogue. Your stance is the most important factor that influences how you apply these techniques.

If you’re worried about getting off message, you may want to control more. If you’re worried that people won’t come up with topics to discuss at an open space or lean coffee, you’ll be tempted to seed topics. If you host an open space and no one has a topic, you stop the open space and give people the gift of time instead.

Finding Balance

There are a time and a place for broadcasting and dialogue. What I’m proposing is to stop using the phrase change communications, because a shift in language can make a big difference in your approach. Now I’m sure someone will make a comment that communication is important, but don’t forget about 2-way communication!

I don’t believe 2-way communication is the same as dialogue. Sometimes what is meant by 2-way communication is taking feedback about what you broadcasted and clarifying the point you wanted to make.

To me, that’s not dialogue so I prefer to shift my language and use the tools I learned when I was a product manager and marketer because that helped me come from a place of making sense of what people really want and need versus what I want them to want and need.

]]>https://leanchange.org/2019/05/modernizing-change-communication/feed/0Change and Agile Leadershiphttps://leanchange.org/2019/04/change-and-agile-leadership/
https://leanchange.org/2019/04/change-and-agile-leadership/#respondWed, 03 Apr 2019 13:03:15 +0000https://leanchange.org/?p=3457We live in the Maker Age. Some are calling this the 4th industrial revolution, others call it the creative age, and some laggards are still clinging to the knowledge age moniker.

Anyway you slice it, when it comes to business today, the barrier to create evolutionary, or disruptive services and products is at an all time low. By the time you read this, 50 new companies would have been started worldwide, and just as many would have died.

In many of my talks, I mention how many change processes exist, and how many agile methods exist. It seems new ones pop up every day.

In fact, there are 894 instances of the word ‘agile’ being trademarked in the US alone, including the term ‘agile coach‘ The point is, noise around agile, change management, and innovation won’t slow down anytime soon so what do you do if you believe your organization needs to evolve, or radically change?

Back in the 70’s Southwest Airlines was in a situation of having to sell one of their four airplanes to stay alive. The problem was, they still needed to service demand for 4-planes. As the story goes, the 10-minute turnaround was created. There was no ‘agile leadership’ at the time, it was simply leadership. Someone was smart enough to say “you know, if we turn around planes faster, we can have more flights with less planes”

The history of business is littered with stories like this, but the problem is, no one is looking since our society has trained us to constantly look ahead to something new. It’s easier on our brains to create something new based on our own biases than to take the time to learn something that someone else has created.

Recently I virtually sat down with Innovation Roots to talk about agile leadership, business agility, and the emotional side of change. Some of the question we explored included:

Is it important to engage people’s logic and appeal to their emotions when undergoing a change at organisational level?

what’s your view on agile leadership?

How can one review the change? Is there any metrics you suggest to measure the success?

]]>https://leanchange.org/2019/04/change-and-agile-leadership/feed/0Making Time for Changehttps://leanchange.org/2019/01/making-time-for-change/
https://leanchange.org/2019/01/making-time-for-change/#respondWed, 23 Jan 2019 16:02:11 +0000https://leanchange.org/?p=3380We’re almost a month into the New Year which means 80% of people have abandoned their resolutions. In this Inc.comarticle, the two main reasons include being unreasonable about your resolution, and the word resolution itself.

I didn’t have a New Year’s resolution this year, and generally haven’t for some time. It used to be because I thought it was crazy to improve something in my life once a year, but more recently it’s because forcing myself to follow a ritual for the sake of following a ritual didn’t give me any motivation to follow through with it.

As humans, we love rituals whether that’s the annual holiday party with family and friends, playing hockey on Sunday nights, or going to that awesome burger place with your buddy who lives in a different city but you still make time for a regular ritual nonetheless. We label our rituals at work meetings, and we complain about how much they suck, or how useless they are, or about having too many, but these are rituals and ceremonies that are vital to making progress in our organizations.

When it comes to making time for change, whether it’s an agile transformation, digital transformation, new system implementation or what-have-you, the urgent work usually takes precedence over the important work. As change agents, the work the organization says is important often takes a back seat, and we end up competing for people’s time and attention who are delivering products, dealing with outages, and other day-to-day activities.

Ritual Inventory

I was working with an enterprise-sized organization that was starting a huge program that would ultimately affect most of the people working there. They wanted to figure out how to make the most of agile knowing they weren’t going to transform the whole program into an agile delivery model. Let’s leave those reasons out because a bonus tip of this article is, meet your clients where they’re at, push them when necessary to give them options, and ultimately let them decide what’s best.

One complaint was adding more meetings to schedules that were already packed because this program had so many stakeholders, decision making couldn’t happen without a large group of people. In my experience, people usually try to cram meetings into an already busy schedule because they feel they have to which means people are up earlier than normal, scheduling meetings through lunch, and working late hours to do their day job because there were too many meetings.

We designed the new rituals necessary for this program and then made a ritual inventory that listed all the meetings, the purpose of them, what decision making groups and teams that were part of the program and decided on who needed to attend each one:

Then we started taking people, teams, and decision making groups of the list unless if it wasn’t absolutely critical they attend. Some people were able to get some time in their day back, others were not, but ultimately it provided clarity of purpose.

Piggybacking Habits

No one likes dealing with IT change management, but in some organizations, especially highly regulated ones, it’s important to have solid change records for auditing purposes. In another organization, the IT change manager was constantly chasing people to cut their change records for upcoming releases.Instead of calling another meeting, we piggybacked a 10-minute standup meeting on top of an existing program-level standup meeting.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we would have 20 – 30 project managers, business managers, and directors attend a daily standup for 15-minutes to talk about any risks, issues or blockers. This organization typically did releases on weekends so when we finished our regular standup, we’d ask anyone who had a release on the weekend, or anyone who was planning to release on the upcoming weekend to stick around for 10-minutes.

We created a big visible release wall, and turned this over to the IT change manager who’d ask if there were any issues from the previous release and to make sure people were ready for the upcoming releases:

Beg, Borrow, and Steal

The idea in this tip probably happens more than you might think. Have you ever begged a management team to get on their agenda? In one organization I was assigned to be the agile coach for a new department. Yes, someone assigned me to fix their teams and people, so I was already starting from a bad spot. I asked around and eventually found a friend of the manager who could introduce me for a quick chat over coffee.After a brief chat, I begged her to let me have the last 10 minutes of her standing weekly team meeting to introduce myself, tell people why I was there, what I did, and the offer for help was there for those who wanted it.

While I was assigned, meaning I had to coach them, any change agent worth their salt knows you can’t force anything on anyone no matter what so I default to a pull-based stance to find the movers and people who want help. Turns out the delivery team didn’t want much help, but the way they managed their roadmap and programs needed tuning. I didn’t spend any time with the team, I ended up working with their program lead to synchronize their backend roadmap with the front-end roadmap team that was under a different directorship. Long story short, over the next year the roadmaps were merged and a couple of backend people were moved to the front-end teams to remove as much of the dependency as possible.

The lesson here is, find a similar ritual and repurpose it versus adding something new.

Sunsetting Rituals

When it comes to transformational change, we often add rituals without taking away others. This is especially true with a shift to agile. Teams are stuck doing old-world activities and then have all the new agile activities piled on top. In another enterprise organization, leadership hired an outside firm to create an agile testing process. There is a whole pile of wrong in that statement, but bear with me here!

Testers had to adhere to the new policies but still had to do all of the old world activities as well which meant there were times when they’d pull all-nighters in the name of QA. In fact, a couple of people had to go on stress leave because they were physically ill from working there. Long story short, when we had to report on how ‘agile’ was going, we told the leadership team they should be ashamed of how they treat people and we fired them as a client.

It’s a good idea to combine tip #1 with this tip. Create an inventory of rituals, including ones that are temporary, and have a plan to sunset rituals when they’ve served their purpose. Think of it this way, have you been through a renovation where major structural changes are needed? A couple of years ago we had part of a wall removed in our house. The contractor had to move some pipes and venting and told us the only way to know for sure was to crack open the wall and see what needed to be done. We agreed and his hypothesis was bang on.

They built a temporary wall to hold up the ceiling while they were re-routing the vents and pipes. That took extra time, but it was necessary. After they moved everything and had the structural engineer verify everything was groovy, they took the temporary wall down.

Other Priorities, Not “No Time”

As a change agent, I’ve always believed my primary responsibility is flexibility. When faced with the no time problem, I shift people’s language towards priorities. That is, you don’t NOT have time, you’ve chosen to prioritize other things. That leads to a dramatically different conversation about what is truly important. There will always be days when delivering is more important, I believe taking a stance of doing the simplest possible thing that maximizes impact by minimizing disruption is the best way to make time for change.

Next week our monthly members-only LCMA lean coffee is about the importance of rituals, how to create them, change them, and how to know when it’s time to sunset them.

]]>https://leanchange.org/2019/01/making-time-for-change/feed/0Change Management: A Look Back at 2018https://leanchange.org/2019/01/change-management-a-look-back-at-2018/
https://leanchange.org/2019/01/change-management-a-look-back-at-2018/#respondMon, 07 Jan 2019 20:30:30 +0000https://leanchange.org/?p=3375This year marks my 3rd State of Change Management blog post. I guess that’s simply a fancy way to say “here’s my WAG (wild-ass guess) for how change management will change this year”

This year will be a little different. Instead of me guessing, I’ve asked Gilbert Kruidiner to combine his efforts on his Change Demographic survey with what I’ve been doing in order to create something that is for the community, by the community. While this is being posted on leanchange.org, the finished product will be posted somewhere else, under a different name, will be completely free and will not be sponsored by me, my properties or any other organization. If you want to skip my observed trends, head to the bottom of the post and let us know what data you want included in the report!

For now, I’ll kick off with what the most popular pieces of content were on leanchange.org and Linked In to see what people seem to be interested in the most:

This page has been viewed more than twice as many times as any other page on this site. This tells me that while there is plenty of anti-tool rhetoric out there, there is still a great deal of value in tools that help people make sense of their context.

2. Meaningful Dialogue through Storytelling (7800+ views on Linked In and Leanchange.org)

This post went live last month so it’s surprising to see how popular it was. I attribute this to a few things. I think the ‘traditional change community’ that has typically relied on either a favorite method or an association to guide what they learn, has started poking around more creative aspects of change.

3. A Manifesto for Agile Change Management (7200+ views on Linked In)

I wrote this post in response to the growing popularity of agile within change management. I found that the general sentiment throughout 2018 moved towards doing-change-at-people-more-effectively by integrating agile tools and techniques. After spending the last 15+ years working on agile teams as a scrum master, coach (internal and external), product owner, tester, change person and more, the most important lesson I learned was that the definition of agile will depend on how the majority of people in your organization view it. Meaning is the most important thing, a standardized definition doesn’t.

4. The Discipline Formerly Known as Change Management (5600+ views on Linked In)

While this didn’t have the most views, it had the most comments, likes and shares. The point of the article was to see what people were saying when they claim that change management is dead. I wrote a post many years back after being pulled into the conversation on twitter and people have been writing about this since 2012. By the way, ‘agile is dead’ has been written about since around the same time so it’s a natural evolution of any discipline methinks. It’s the author(s)’s way of saying, “you know, something’s not working…let’s talk“

The amount of interaction on this post tells me more people are interested in exploring better ways to facilitate change because change is a topic in every discipline nowadays from coaching to leadership, to business, agile, HR, and beyond.

This was a summary of a keynote I gave for Agile HR Finland and was inspired by Nina Karlsson who created a sketch-note of the talk. The main idea is that knowledge is free nowadays, the heart and soul of a change agent matters more than a method, certification, or process. Find your groove and focus on what matters.

Honorable Mentions:

Your Lessons, and What You’re Looking Foward to in 2019

I asked on Linked In a couple of months ago about how to change my annual post into something more community driven, and surprisingly, zero people provided input! While Gibert and I co-ordinate our efforts, I’d like to ask you 7 questions we can use as input into the creation of a community-driven, and FREE report that you can use however you wish.

]]>https://leanchange.org/2019/01/change-management-a-look-back-at-2018/feed/0Triggering Meaningful Dialogue with Storytellinghttps://leanchange.org/2018/12/triggering-meaningful-dialogue-with-storytelling/
https://leanchange.org/2018/12/triggering-meaningful-dialogue-with-storytelling/#respondFri, 14 Dec 2018 14:56:56 +0000https://leanchange.org/?p=3370If you’ve ever seen a Disney movie, you know what great storytelling looks like. The hero gets a call to action; turns it down, or fails, or runs away; finds meaning in what they were asked to do through a mentor; and finally, they come back and are successful.

When teaching a Lean Change Management class, we usually let the attendees choose which of the proposed Lean Change Canvases they want to work on as a group, or several groups when the class is a bit bigger. I noticed the Story Telling Canvas was often left out, and when I asked the attendees why, they often mentioned things like: “It doesn’t seem to be as impactful as the others.”, or “It’s unclear to me how to work with this.”.

During the last class, we changed our way of working and specifically guided the attendees in using the different canvases and debrief on what the strength and weakness of each canvas was. The Story Telling Canvas turned out to be the only one who got featured on the training “AHA-Wall” as having brought an AHA-moment to someone.

Using Storytelling in Change Management

We underestimate the value of informality and storytelling in our organizations when it comes to change. There are parallels between The Hero’s Journey in a movie and organizational change. While there are 3 phases and 17 stages, I’ll summarize the 3 phases and 1 key stage in each phase:

Phase

In Classic Storytelling

In Change Management

How Change Management can change to accommodate storytelling

What’s important here

Departure (5 stages)

The beginning of the journey where the hero sets off into the unknown.

Change initiatives generally start out as projects or programs and some type of readiness assessment.

The hero refuses the call out of fear, insecurity, personal meaning or more.

This is the dreaded change resistance! Change managers label people as resisters.

Change resistance is not a thing. It’s created by change agents. A better way to depart into the change is co-creation and inclusion into the journey itself.

Empathy, understanding and meaningful dialogue

Initiation (6 Stages)

Learning through trials. The hero tries and fails, oddly enough in groups of threes.

This is the ‘transition’ stage many change models references. Oddly enough, the first couple of attempts don’t get the intended results but the 3rd and 4th time around more success is achieved.

Instead of executing change activities, try small experiments, visualize change work on a big visible wall, and shorten your iterations.

Emphasis on learning, and diagnostics not binary outcomes (success/failure)

Initiation: The Ultimate Boon

The hero achieves the goal.

This is analogous to the Transforming Idea in the Satir change model. This is when people ‘get it’, this is not the achievement of ROI .

Success doesn’t happen at the end of the project. It happens constantly, look for small “AHA!” moments regardless of the phase you’re in.

Connecting innovators and early adopters with people who are perceived as resisters.

The Return (6 Stages)

The hero brings back the prize or learnings to the ‘old world’

Unfortunately, in traditional change management, especially agile transformations, the ‘hero’ leaves the organization because they realized they want something they can’t obtain in their current one.

Give change agents the autonomy and freedom they seek to facilitate meaningful change. Allow them to visit other orgs, host meetups and more.

Bridging the gap between the people who “get it” and those struggling with the change. It’s the difference of beliefs here that creates stress.

The Return: Freedom to Live

The freeing feeling of living in the moment by not anticipating the future or living in the past.

Unfortunately, this is usually the blame stage. The change managers don’t know why the change didn’t work so they’ll externalize the blame, usually by citing resistance, lack of leader support, not enough buy-in, or bad communication.

This is where the organization has become adaptable. The problem doesn’t matter because the organization has learned how to be adaptable.

Understanding that reducing uncertainty is much better than blindly embracing it.

Pitfalls to Avoid

An idea or tool is limited to the mindset of the person using it. Some interpret storytelling as a change management practise where the change manager crafts the story to tell people what it is. Either that or they craft a message for leaders who want a change, much like scriptwriters in a movie, for the sake of optics. This is not what storytelling is. Meaning and understanding are not developed by being talked at, the story must be co-developed and different perspectives need to be considered:

Organizational Perspective: Why the organization needs to change. How did things use to work? What’s changed internally and in the market? What needs to happen?

Leadership Perspective: What’s in it for the leaders? Expect cynicism as people think it’s to obtain bonuses. While that is probably true, very few leaders make the change about that. I’ve can’t remember working with any leader who didn’t care deeply about their employees. Sometimes they’re just as stuck like everybody else!

People Perspective: This is the WIIFM (What’s in it for Me?) statement. You cannot tell people what’s in it for them, they need to discover it on their own.

Developing the Story

The impact of taking a storytelling approach will be limited to your creativity!

Visualizing the Story on a Wall

Use Lego Serious Play

I frequently use Lego Serious Play to help people explore the story from 3 different perspectives. This organization wanted to figure out how to manage doubling in size, what they wanted to keep about their exsting culture, and what would need to change.

Building a shared understanding of the future.

Remember, the story needs to mean something to the people affected so it must be developed together! The job of the change agent is to facilitate the conversation!